


moonlight casts obscuring shadows on his face

by apotheosizing



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, During Canon, Gen, POV Outsider, Pre-Canon, The Old Hunters DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28843923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apotheosizing/pseuds/apotheosizing
Summary: Three incomplete portraits of the first vicar.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	moonlight casts obscuring shadows on his face

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MrsLittletall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsLittletall/gifts).



> Written as part of the Inhuman Utterings Discord Secret Santa-tines exchange!
> 
> I've never written about Laurence before and I found him at first blush to be such a tough nut to crack, being so central to the game but only through the way his actions affect others, so I had a lot of fun thinking about how I wanted to preserve that position for him in this fic. Hopefully you enjoy the result!

Elizabeth deposited herself gracelessly in the hard wooden chair, one leg that had been pushed out of its socket by generations of students doing the same wobbling beneath her. Her attention was fixed on the sheaf of notes in her hands as a disorganized clarity slowly rose out of the nigh indecipherable scrawl.

Cutting through the whirlwind of her preparation was the sound of rising voices from behind the door of Master Willem’s office. A pane of frosted glass sat between her and confirmation of the visitor’s identity but she knew only one student dared to be so frank with their headmaster.

It had begun with small matters. She remembered the first time Laurence had raised his hand, so deferent and polite, to countermand a lecturer on some obscurity or another. Her eyebrows had nearly shot off her face, so fast they’d raised. Worst of all, he had been right.

Perhaps her dislike of him was unfair. She had seen the evidence of sleepless nights in the dark circles under his eyes, just as she had in all her schoolmates, but still the porcelain mask never cracked.

It was strange to watch the rise of a star from the earth below, she thought, a starshower in reverse.

The door opened, pulling her focus down to the ink that had begun to blotch her fingertips from gripping her notes so tightly. She watched from the corner of her eye as Laurence swept from the room in a flurry of robes, walking like a man possessed.

For a moment, she wanted to leap up, grab his arm, and ask what fueled his steps. She remained seated as he vanished down the hall and then, with a deep, shaky breath, she plastered on a smile and stepped into the office.

* * *

The vicar did not strike Tomas as a sentimental man and yet a bouquet of flowers sat in a vase at the corner of his desk. Its porcelain neck called to mind the delicate curve of a swan’s, a banded red and brown design of blood and earth contrasting against the celestial halo of petals.

The flowers were nearly sunflowers, with white petals rather than yellow. He thought of golden, pastoral scenes - the kind poets wrote of - and wondered if it was a memento of some far-flung home.

Information about the vicar’s past (his meteoric rise through his cohort at Byrgenwerth aside) was almost non-existent, so it was easy for the mind to wander through those fields, aimless. Still, Tomas could not imagine the vicar in such a place - harsh sunlight unmitigated by clouds and heat rising from the tilled soil, scholar’s hands turned from the use of quills to the hoe, the sickle, the flail. His thoughts turned to other explanations.

A gift, then, or one of vanishingly few personal touches to the office in which he spent much of his time. He knew that the vicar spent many a sleepless night of the hunt with the solitude of his thoughts, more so than even the lieutenants of the hunter’s workshop themselves, perhaps it was as simple as breaking up the varnished walnut of the space.

He was called back from his ambling thoughts by the creak of the door hinges behind him. “My apologies, Father Tomas, there was an urgent matter that required my immediate attention,” the vicar said, a weariness-strained smile crossing his lips as he crossed to resume his seat.

“Think nothing of it, Your Grace.” Tomas returned the smile, a gesture of familiarity emboldened by what he thought he now knew of the vicar, of the man behind the title. “Now, where were we?”

* * *

A small stumble was all it took. The age-old mechanisms ground against each other as the operating theatre-turned-altar began to move beneath Ash’s feet, startling them back from the lip of the raised platform. The tableau’s grave stone faces appeared to be boring into them as the imposing figures rose back to the chapel above.

Once they regained their balance, they turned on their heel with a grumble to recall the platform, but stopped short at the sound of something clicking into place. Where a dark void should have sat, another altar had risen - a trick lift.

Atop the altar, attended by obsidian supplicants, was a human skull. They frowned, confusion miring their mind, until cloying insight bubbled like eyes bobbing to the surface of unclear water. What fragments of alien thought reached down to them through the stained glass whispered of a man who had beckoned them but so too did the unshakable conviction that antlers and a canine snout should have protruded from the blood-stained cloth it had been wrapped in, the features of a holy beast.

They found that the sharp contours of moon-bleached bones felt warm, skirting dangerously at the very edge of uncomfortable to handle even through their thick butchering gloves. It was as though a raging fever still occupied the mind long decayed within the cage of the skull, blazing and burning unceasing, the memories within curling at the edges like ambrotypes cast on the hearth.

The recollection of another altar at the inception of this nightmare took root in their mind. The pendant they had used to reach the research halls of the Healing Church they had found clutched in the hand of a beast. Yharnam was a city of altars and cathedrals, true, but they were certain that the two split by the blood that ran through the nightmare’s streets were linked.

Turning tail before they could think better of it, they carried the skull before them like a talisman to light their way as they raced back to the twisted Cathedral Ward.


End file.
